Category Archives: Individual Rights

UPDATE VIII: Just A Girl With A Gun; Not A Gratuitous Killer (Who’s Stupid?)

Conservatism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, GUNS, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Morality, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, The West

“Just A Girl With A Gun; Not A Gratuitous Killer” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“… and Esau was a man who understood hunting, a man of the field.”
— Beresheet (Genesis), 25:27

The place: a South African secondary school.

The setting: an English class.

Lights, camera, action:

The teacher is quizzing the class. One senior—she happens to be my sister—provides the rapid-fire reply:

Teacher: “What is a taxidermist?”

Sister: “a motherf-cker.”

That was a long time ago, but I have no doubt that my witty sibling would extend similar linguistic niceties (adapted to the fairer sex) to Melissa Bachman.

Ms. Bachman is described by OutdoorLife.com as a big-game hunter, host of the hunting reality show, “Winchester Deadly Passion.” The controversy that continues to eddy around Bachman “began when she posted a picture of herself with an African lion on her webpage and Facebook page. She wrote of the trophy pic: ‘An incredible day hunting in South Africa! Stalked inside 60-yards on this beautiful male lion. What a hunt!'”

South Africans were disgusted by the woman, seen here grinning (or, rather, grimacing) from ear to ear, as she crouches beside the dead beast. They want to ban her from their country.

“It’s perfectly legal,” roared the conservative pack animals stateside. Especially eager to exhibit their macho-girl credentials were the younger chicks of this silly species. …

… More to the point: an act that is legal is not necessarily moral…

… At best, these “conservative” screeches can lay claim to an impoverished, utilitarian philosophy, whereby such gratuitous, showy killing is condoned because it reduces man’s evil incentives to kill unprovoked.

Another gargoyle with a gun is teletart S. E. Cupp. Here Cupp is sprawled over a bear’s carcass, facial featurs deformed in Dionysian ecstasy.

The statement must first be qualified: I am a girl with guns. The writer’s weapon of choice is the Smith and Wesson 686P .357 4″. This gorgeous piece will fend off most wild beasts. But certain bedrock principles—arguably a true conservative mindset—dictate a respect for life. A life-conserving sensibility means that guns are meant for self-defense, not for needless killing. …

(Click to enlarge)

… Read on. The complete column, “Just A Girl With A Gun; Not A Gratuitous Killer,” is now on WND.

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UPDATE I (11/22): This column—probably one of my favorites; I’m never pleased with what I write, but this is a strong piece of writing—is making me a lot of enemies; as many, perhaps, as when I officially came out against the invasion of Iraq (Sept. 19, 2002). American “conservatives” sicken—not all, but for the most—they don’t understand a moral argument.

A paleolibertarian (at least, one who is not lazy) will make moral arguments, because of a conviction that liberty has a civilizational dimension.

Clyde Wilson, the great paleoconservative historian of the South, concurs. He writes:

Dear Lady, Good column today. I have had arguments before with some libertarians that maximum exploitation of the earth is not defensible. Stewardship with necessary use is the moral way.
Clyde

It’s an honor to be called a “lady” by a chivalrous gentlemen and scholar of the South.

UPDATE II: A LESSON FROM A REAL MAN. Writes a farmer and outdoorsman from Canada:

For the most part I agree with you, especially in principle. I am not a “trophy hunter” but hunt for healthy food. I learned the lesson well when I was 13. I shot a huge bull elk from a herd that was devastating our 20 acre oats crop. I stayed home from school and it took me all day to clean, saw into six parts with a hand saw, skin and hang it. When my dad came home from working in a sawmill, he gave me a real dressing down.
“Why in hell didn’t you shoot a nice young cow?” Something you could eat in other words. Had there been such a thing back in 1954, this 7X7 “Royal” head would have easily been in upper Boone and Crockett ranking.
As it was, I only kept the antlers and eventually they were stolen from our old homestead as I had preserved them in our log “chicken house.”
It was a good lesson, as the meat was so tough and sinewy that even when my mother tried to pressure can some, it was still almost impossible to chew. Since then I always pass up “trophy” animals and only shoot when I have room in my deep freeze. Ethical trophy hunting does not distress me, as long as no meat is wasted, but publicly displaying such when most people are against any taking of wild animals, especially penned up hunts, is at best ignorant and immoral.
Bachman’s rather grotesque photo is a poignant confirmation of this. I look at “penned hunts” as no more or less terrible than shooting a steer on the farm to butcher for table meat. Penned trophy hunts are no more “hunting” than shooting fish in a barrel. Public parading of such killing is obscene at best. Killing lions, endangered in the wild as their range continues to disappear, for “sport” or “trophy” cannot be condoned. Any bets on whether the meat was saved for consumption?
… I was rooting for the lion.

UPDATE III: MANLY WOMEN ARE MUTANTS. In response to Fred Cummins on Facebook: I haven’t the faintest idea how your rant ties to my column, which came out against the un-conservative vulgarity and showy inhumanity of what goes for female conservatism. Wild animals who approach human habitat must be eliminated. I’ve said as much in “Picnic Time For Teddy Bears,” for example.
Again, nuance is lost on you guys, who find a stupid woman, playing at being a man to be a turn-on. Yuck.
As a reader once put it, “This is what happens when women try and become or perform ‘masculine’ activities. They don’t actually understand the man’s view of the world, so they fake it – usually poorly. I see this in situations like when my wife tries to watch football and be one of the guys… her comments are over the top, and lack a certain depth of understand of the game that most guys share intuitively. Your descriptions of how she *should* have reacted capture what a man would think/do in the situation much better.”

UPDATE IV: Nonsense, Nixter Jeelvy: THIS IS HOW the animals we eat live and die, cited in a fine, well-research philosophical treatise:

“Even if the animals we eat had decent lives, which they do not, we would still have to face up to the manner of their deaths: ‘No jokes here, and no turning away. Let’s say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned, and dismembered while conscious’. Safran Foer is talking specifically about cattle here, but the deaths of other animals differ only in minor details. Typically, cattle are led down a chute to a ‘knocking box’. Here, theoretically, a steel bolt is shot into the cow’s brain. ‘Sometimes the bolt only dazes the animal, which either remains conscious or wakes up as it is being ‘processed’. ‘Processing’ continues with wrapping a chain around the animal’s leg, and hoisting it into the air. Then, it is moved to a ‘sticker’, who cuts its throat. If the knocking hasn’t done its work, then, as one slaughterhouse worker put it: ‘They’d be blinking and stretching their necks from side to side, looking around, really frantic’. Then they move on to the ‘head skinner’, where the skin is peeled off the head of the animal. Some cattle, not the majority but a non-negligible minority, find themselves still conscious at this stage. Then, on to the ‘leggers’, who cut off the lower portions of the animals’ legs. At this point: ‘As far as the ones that come back to life \[go\] . . . the cattle just go wild, kicking in every direction’. …”

UPDATE IV: Salome Esterhuizen (FB): Mbe Disney movies is the culprit here. Privately owned game farms provide work for 100 000 people in SA.

Ilana Mercer: Salome Esterhuizen: Why is what you say a contradiction or mutually exclusive to what I say? Yes, jobs are had from miserable animals. Some argue this is an absolute good, others advocate a more evolved morality. I won’t patronize Sea World; you go and cheer with the masses. Ultimately, no one is advancing a legal remedy; this is a moral position. You’re talkign to someone who defended Michael Vick, for heaven’s sake.

UPDATE VI 11/23): WHO’S STUPID. This letter is funny: Writes John Russel @ WND:

“I’ve followed your columns for many years but until now I did not know that you are a complete idiot, both you and your sister.”

Er, someone has stepped right into it. Russel admits to having read me for years but has only just discovered I’m an idiot?! What kind of an idiot takes so many years to discover … You get the drift.

UPDATE VII: Another funny exchange is with Anon, at EPJ, Comments:

Anonymous November 23, 2013 at 12:10 PM:

Her sister is witty for responding “motherf-cker”? What razor sharp wit! When my dog barks its disapproval is that being witty too?
Reply
Replies

ilana mercer November 23, 2013 at 4:29 PM:

Anon: If you ask your dog what a taxidermist is and he replies “motherf-cker,” then I think you have a keeper—a witty dog indeed. But all your dog does is bark. (My parrot, on the other hand, talks. He makes a lot of sense too.) Best wishes, ilana mercer.

On the other hand, “Anon” (“NY Cynic”), if he is the same “Anon,” does a good job on the same site (@ Comments), debunking race-reality deniers: those who walk around, hands on honky ears humming loudly, until… they are coshed on the head by a black youth. Then another. And another. Apparently, according to some simple-minded libertarians, describing reality is a function of a collectivist habit of mind. Oh Buddha! If so, so-called self-styled individualists are doomed to extinction. “Collectivists”—as in a person who cleaves to reality—will outlive self-described libertarian individualists.

UPDATE VIII: Magda Cracknell Neé Steenkamp on Facebook: “My 2c.. I’m an animal lover raised in a family of hunters. To find that moral compass took some time… years in fact! Your comment is factual and most would agree, in fact this would never have made the headlines was it not for the way this young lady and her entourage left ‘respect for life’ behind and brought ‘wow look at me’ with, when she decided to hunt canned meat! Comes down to crossing that thin line…. ….have no problem with hunting for food.. in SA it’s a sacred culture handed down from Grandfather, to son, to grandsons …all taught by Granddad.. ‘what’ to shoot, ‘where’ to shoot it, ‘how’ to shoot it. Never take a hit if you feel it’s a miss…shoot only what you can carry and slaughter yourself. Golden Rule: if you can’t eat it, don’t shoot it! I will never partake in the hunt but I know how blessed we are, for my dad taught my kids to do by all that is right and good – Only kill what you can eat, and do it with respect! Human was not created Beast, but to rule over Beast… Canned Lion not my idea of hunting nor does it carry much weight when one applies the Godly instruction to rule over Beast! Canned Lion Hunt Stinks! As does any poaching activity or killing sprees conducted by man for man… ie: seal pups, rhino, dolphin slaughter, whaling…oh the things that people from the East do to cats and dogs …. just to many to mention. Not everybody abides by the rule: respect life and that is the problem! in fact I see white people killing animals the same way we see blacks killing whites these days…. just for the heck of it. That saddens me! And then to the topic of what happens at our slaughter houses in SA .. all one can do is weep…. For cruelty has become order of the day and sheeple eat packaged meat, never a thought of how it got there… a far worse journey than the buck my hubby killed with one shot, providing food for a whole winter!”

Ilana Mercer: Magda Cracknell Neé Steenkamp: “Canned lion”: that’s a brilliant way of putting it. I admire your tradition and agree with you ethics.

UPDATE II: President Pinocchio’s Growing Proboscis

Barack Obama, Democrats, Healthcare, Individual Rights

“President Pinocchio’s Growing Proboscis” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… Voluntarily, 14 million Americans had purchased and paid for their now-obsolete, outlawed health-care insurance. Stated differently, these individuals valued what the policy had to offer more than the money it cost them. They liked the product the president has proscribed.

And they don’t like what replaces it. George Schwab of North Carolina was “’perfectly happy” to continue paying Blue Cross Blue Shield a premium of $228 a month to insure himself and his wife.

President Obama wasn’t having any of it. By legislative fiat, he stopped what was a mutually beneficial arrangement between the two consenting parties.

On Oct. 30, Big Brother Obama claimed that Mr. Schwab and millions of happy customers like him were “underinsured.” So Obama ensured that for “underinsuring” themselves, these Americans would lose their insurance.

Mr. Schwab and his ilk are now without insurance.

From the president’s perspective, the 62-year-old man does not know what’s good for him. Fortunately for Mr. Schwab and other clueless clients like him, Big Brother does. To the rescue came Obama. Mr. Schwab had fallen prey to a “bad apple insurer,” grated the president. He is among “5 percent of Americans, who’ve got cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident.”

Foolish Mr. Schwab. He was content with a purchase Mr. Obama deemed “substandard.” Luckily for Mr. Schwab and a million other Americans, so far, the president removed their “substandard plan” before it could hurt them.

Better to be uninsured than to have “substandard” insurance.

Also on Oct. 30 did Mr. Obama vow to the Mr. Schwabs of America—roughly 14 million of them—that they would be “getting a better deal.” “Almost all the insurers,” cooed the president, “are encouraging people to join better plans with the same carrier and stronger benefits and stronger protections while others will be able to get better plans with new carriers through the marketplace …”

Desperate, Mr. Schwab went looking for the Promised Plan.

He discovered that Barack Obama’s command-and-control, nationalized “marketplace” would be charging him $948 a month for a plan that met the president’s requirements, one of which was that everybody must “contribute.” Everyone must “take some measure of responsibility,” preached Obama.

A monthly premium hike of more than 400 percent is to be Mr. Schwab’s “contribution” to the un-Affordable Care Act’s collective kitty. …

Read the complete column. “President Pinocchio’s Growing Proboscis” is now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE I: MEGYN KELLY interviews MARC THIESSEN of the AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FELLOW, who explains why it was essential for Obama to finish off the individual market for health-care insurance: this relatively wealthy cohort must be funneled into his nationalized “markets” and made to fund it.

KELLY: … And tonight, we have dug up an IRS form from 2010 that shows that this administration knew that over 10 million Americans would not keep their plan, could not keep their doctor. And yet the president went out as recently as 2012 and said if you like your plan you could keep it. Meantime there is a regulation — an IRS regulation, it was pushed by HHS, Human Services, that said estimated that tens of millions would going to get dumped.

Marc Thiessen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. And I mean, this is it. It is one thing to say — he said they were going to get to keep their plans, period. And now this regulation shows that months after ObamaCare was passed, July, it passed in March. July or before, I should say. Before, they knew. They were estimating internally in the administration ten million people are going to lose their insurance.

MARC THIESSEN, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FELLOW: Yes. You’ve got the smoking gun right there in your hand. Look, they knew. When President Obama looked at the American people in the eye and said if you like your health insurance, you can keep your current plan, period, no matter what, that was a bald-faced lie.

And he intended — in fact, I think that they intended for these people to lose their health insurance. And the reason for that is — as you pointed out — it will be up to 14 million people. Why would they want those people to lose their health insurance? Because they need those people to move into the exchanges to subsidize the poor people.

The individual mandate is the most lucrative part — I’m sorry, the individual market is the most lucrative part of the segment of the health insurance industry because those people don’t use a lot of services and they are generally healthy. And so, those are the people that they need to move into the exchanges in order to subsidize ObamaCare.

So, while President Obama was going out there saying you won’t lose your health insurance, period, all along they were planning for those people to lose their health insurance — 14 million of them and move into the exchanges.

UPDATE II: Pat Buchanan quips in his latest column:

Obama’s assurances of keeping your insurance plan if you like it now enters presidential history alongside George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips! No new taxes,” Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” and George W. Bush’s tales of yellow cake in Niger and hidden arsenals of WMDs.

Priceless.

Long Live Big Brother

Government, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Intelligence, Internet, Law, Liberty, Media, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism

Long live Big Brother
By Myron Pauli

In 1788, Jefferson observed: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground”. Now, apparently, our National Security Agency might be compiling a Yottabyte of data – a trillion trillion bytes which is over 3000 trillion bytes per American. Consider that to store a 9 digit zipcode on you every minute for 100 years is only 1 billion bytes (without data compression), that is a lot of information – “We want information”.

Banks, FBI, IRS, and “Fair-Tax advocates” want to eliminate cash – thus, everything you spend can be monitored. Devices in your car, phone, person, and probably soon clothing can track you 24/7. Like Santa Claus, the government knows when you are sleeping and knows when you’re awake – and stores that knowledge indefinitely.

Search engines can find out who you call, where you go, what you read and write, your friends, your relatives, your medical records, your purchases – all accessible. Is Joe Biden a stingy tipper or did Rand Paul ever set foot in a strip club – ask Uncle Sam? Blackmail-R-Us.

And who has access – potentially millions of people – J Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Bradley Manning, IRS, Barack Obama, Verizon, Vladimir Putin, FBI, CIA, BATF, Alabama State Police, Citigroup, who knows… – and anyone that one of these people gives information to! Search for “libertarian Jews” or “anorexic Ukrainian lesbians” or imagine a Chinese agent in Utah searching for “Chinese grad students in America who read Ayn Rand” – all inside that Yottabyte – soon to be expanded to kilo-Yottabytes.

With new laws and “administrative regulations” passed each year, more and more Americans are probably in some degree of non-compliance. In the past, of course, surveillance was confined to hard core terrorists such as Wendell Willkie, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Robert Bork, and Martha Stewart.

Now it is YOU!

Just contemplate all the info in the hands of prosecutors such as Michael Nifong, Angela Corey, Torquemada, and John Yoo – exercising their prosecutorial discretion. America already holds 25% of jail inmates worldwide and the Yottabyte archive can assure our global leadership in this category for years to come.

The mainstream media, however, seems to care little. From FOX through MSNBC, the focus is not on the 4th Amendment (what’s that??) but just how “Snowden is evil” (24-1 in Washington Post op-eds). Harassing the lover of reporter Glenn Greenwald (is David Miranda a terrorist?) only receives minor attention.

When the media focuses on human rights, it concentrates on the specks and logs in overseas eyeballs and not in our own. We are told how things are bad for blacks in Libya or Christians in Egypt (sometimes as a result of our own meddling!). That is the “safe” human rights advocacy – it not only does not challenge the American power structure but actually supports the Department of Defense.

“Fight mistreatment of gays in Russia with the Lockheed F-35 fighter” or “Build the Zumwalt destroyer to liberate women in Afghanistan.” Where popular opinion could make a difference – that is, our own country. – we can just be told “Shut up – it is always worse in North Korea”.

Then we can add in “Stop-and-frisk.” Rightists love anything that involves police and military. Leftists only care if it is “fair” – frisking black “youths” at midnight is OK if you frisk oriental grandmothers at noon. Harassing Farouk from Yemen, when boarding an airplane is fine as long as 5-year-old Suzi from Ashtabula also gets the rubber hose. An Equal-Opportunity-Gestapo – hallelujah!

There are some signs that some Americans are changing their minds on the limitless Yottabyte Archive State. Unfortunately, there will always be “threats” – some wacko will shoot up a school periodically or a Boston Marathon bomber or DC Sniper will strut his stuff. In between the low-level carnage, the FBI can always find (typically) ex-con addicted minority dimwits and convince them to try to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with wire cutters or drive a bus into the Sears Tower. The trillions of $$ spent on defense can never be enough and the Yottabyte Archive needs more info on all of us. As they might say in Casablanca, “Round up the usual 313,900,000 subjects”.

Long live Big Brother!

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

Surveillance Societies Condition Helplessness, Anxiety and Compliance.

Constitution, Individual Rights, Internet, Justice, Law, Liberty, Regulation, Technology, Terrorism, The State

“It’s slow and subtle,” writes Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez, “but surveillance societies inexorably train us for helplessness, anxiety and compliance. Maybe they’ll never look at your call logs, read your emails or listen in on your intimate conversations. You’ll just live with the knowledge that they always could — and if you ever had anything worth hiding, there would be nowhere left to hide it.”

An superb piece by Sanchez, which I’ve followed, below, with a Sanchez segment on Stossel:

Some of the potentially sensitive facts those records expose becomes obvious after giving it some thought: Who has called a substance abuse counselor, a suicide hotline, a divorce lawyeror an abortion provider? What websites do you read daily? What porn turns you on? What religious and political groups are you a member of?

Some are less obvious. Because your cellphone’s “routing information” typically includes information about the nearest cell tower, those records are also a kind of virtual map showing where you spend your time — and, when aggregated with others, who you like to spend it with.

It’s precisely this kind of analysis the NSA is likely interested in doing to help “fingerprint” either specific suspects or the general profile of a terror suspect. Link that information to other data sets being collected, like credit card bills, and you can even deduce when a woman is pregnant before her own family knows. Think of big data analysis as a statistical Sherlock Holmes, capable of making surprising inferences from seemingly insignificant details and patterns.

But fine, so what if a bunch of strangers in a room in Fort Meade could, in principle, discover these things about you? There’s no reason to think they’re digging for that kind of stuff, and even if they did, it’d be like learning there are naked photos of you circulating in a Mongolian village: A little creepy, maybe, but unlikely to have a concrete effect on your life.

Assuming you don’t match a profile that gets you flagged for more intensive surveillance, that’s probably right — as long as they’re only using that vast, rich database to look for specific terror or espionage suspects. If they change their minds about the rules governing access to the database or how it’s put to use, of course, we’re unlikely to ever know; we didn’t know what the rules were before the leak either.

That’s one problem with bulk collection of data. The information often sticks around indefinitely, while the rules only stick around until someone decides to change them. The IRS is all fired up to use big data to hunt for tax cheats, and in principle, the NSA can disseminate evidence of some crime. Sooner or later, other agencies may start to wonder why such a juicy data set is going to waste.

But the average person is unlikely to pique the NSA’s interest, even when those sweeping surveillance powers are abused for purposes ranging beyond terrorism. It probably won’t affect you personally or directly.

However, that seems like an awfully narrow way to think about the importance of privacy. Folks don’t usually say (aloud, anyway), “I’m white, why should I care about racism?” or, “My political and religious views are too mainstream to ever be restricted, so why should I care about the First Amendment?”

READ ON.

And watch (no transcripts, of course) Stossel, as Sanchez explains that “most cellphone carriers have the capability to install remote spyware on your cell phone,” in addition to the dozens of [other] ways we can [and are being] tracked.